LegalZoom head of Corp Recruiting Mike Dunn Interview on Shally's Alley

By the time I see it, it already started. All right, so it looks like we are live. Hey everybody, it's Friday, it's 1 PM, so that must mean it's time for Shelly's Alley. I'm really excited today. This is my second Leadership Series, um, interview, and got really good feedback on the interview with Jim, so I'm very, very happy to bring on board my friend Mike. I know you've got Michael on your LinkedIn, but can I call you Mike?

Absolutely. Yeah.

All right. Mike Dunn is now heading into a brand new job. He's going to start on Monday with LegalZoom. Tell me a little bit about that. You're starting as the head of recruiting for corporate tax. Yeah.

So, uh, LegalZoom— I, I'm very fortunate to have an opportunity to work with an executive from my, from my not too distant past to reached out to me and asked me if I'd be interested in coming to LegalZoom and doing some of the things there that we had done together before. So very excited. I'll be heading up the corporate recruiting, sales, and tax side. I have a counterpart that oversees the engineering, and then we all roll up to James Misik, who is the executive over all of recruiting. So good opportunity. They just went public about a month ago. So very exciting time to be joining a company that's going to be scaling into the future, adding new products, you know, You don't get very many of these opportunities in a career. Let's just put it that way.

Sounds really exciting. Absolutely. And wow. So I know LegalZoom, obviously, from having used their templates many times. It's just one of those companies that never thought to me, oh, of course they have to do recruiting, you know? Right. Because it's always been just like an app that I use. So, you know, I'm sure you're going to have some really interesting challenges. I don't know if you know, if you realize this, but you and I go way back to 2007.

We do that. I never thought I'd hear myself say, I remember back when, but here we are in the day.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, no, we first connected when I was at PowerWave in the telecom world where I kind of cut my teeth as a leader in recruiting. And, you know, we've kind of stayed in touch ever since then, on and off, even up through the most recent company at ZT Systems.

Yeah, 15 years later, um, here we are. So It's definitely a pleasure having you back. You also did some managing, some recruiting at Accenture as well. So you got the consulting, you've got the systems and implementation technology, and now the dot-com. But something I wanted to highlight is you have an economics degree. There's not a lot of econ majors in TA. I mean, there are plenty, but it's not a lot. You see a lot more other types of degrees. And economics is one of those degrees, it's like when you go to college and you take economics, there's— it's— you don't have a particular career in mind, right? Because it applies to like so many different things.

Yeah.

Did you think when you were in economics that it was going to apply to HR?

No. I mean, if you would have asked me 20 years ago if I ever thought I'd wind up leading recruiting teams across the globe, I would have laughed at you and said you're crazy. That's That's the furthest thing from my mind. But what I have appreciated over the years is that background has allowed me to bring data to the conversation. So rather than allowing an organization to manage by perception, and let's be honest with ourselves, perception is generally not connected to reality in a lot of cases. Sometimes it is, but generally it's not, or only portions of it are. So what I've been able to leverage that background is in the appreciation for understanding what's happening, sharing that data with stakeholders, and then ultimately allowing them to help me shape the future together as a team versus the finger-pointing that sometimes occurs in our world, which I'm sure you've experienced over the course of your career as well. So, you know, not a career path I anticipated, but it's certainly a career path I have appreciated and enjoyed and hope to be in for quite some time yet.

I'm surprised you wouldn't have said, what is recruiting? When somebody told you that, when you were an econ major. So that actually was my question. I was going to ask you, you know, as an economics person that, you know, kind of had your formative education in that, how has that changed your perception? And how do you use that to your advantage in the leadership position? So you actually jumped the shark on that one and answered that question.

Sorry about that.

No, great. That's— we're on the same track here. So fantastic. And I wanted to ask you a little bit, kind of taking advantage of your background in economics and your background in leading recruiting systems, and I know you've also been involved with creating sourcing plans and sourcing strategies, pretty well-rounded set of experiences. What do you see is the— what's the improvement that we need to make in TA right now? What is it that we need to be doing that we haven't done in TA?

So I would take and put the human back in human resources. And what I mean by that is to say the candidate experience. We are in a hyper-competitive market. I mean, I, I think this is even more competitive than it was during the dot-com era, you know, in the early 2000s, to be honest with you. So when I look at TA, we have tools, we have processes, but how often do we sit down around the table with partners, including our our people that are interviewing, our HR executives and say, what do we think our candidate experience looks like? And the reason why I think that's critical is because myself, having gone through interviews recently myself with, with not just LegalZoom, but a number of other organizations, I will base my judgment on how hard or easy it will be for me to do my job in that organization based on my experience as a candidate going through the interview process. And a lot of times I think companies forget that that experience ultimately can lead to a yes or a no when it comes to offer time. I think, again—

More than money, more than—

Yeah, I mean, of course we have to pay our bills, but when you look at the things that are important to people today, it's what is the culture of the company? What is my experience gonna be like working at that organization? Money is usually somewhere in the top 5, and you'll see different studies that will tell you, some will tell you it's number 2, some will tell you it's number 5, but at the end of the day, I've been doing this long enough to know that when people tell me no, It is almost exclusively around something that we had control over in the interview process that created a wrong perception, whether it be taking too long to get them through the process or whether they just didn't feel like the people that were interviewing them were well tuned into what the role was and everything in between.

So leaving a bad taste in their mouth and then ruining the, ruining the offer, ruining the experience as a result of that.

I think we forget we have to sell these candidates on the opportunity even before this environment, even pre-COVID. I think hiring managers sometimes get in the mindset that the candidate should be glad they're interviewing with them and feel appreciative. And I think candidates do, but candidates also have opportunities and options, especially what you call your A-level players, right? They have multiple opportunities and why are they going to pick one over the other? And a lot of the time, a lot of times it has to do what was my experience like? Because that translates to what will my work-life experience be like?

That's a good point. So, you know, I worked for— I built sourcing teams and led sourcing teams at some fairly attractive companies, but I had the distinct, I guess, disadvantage of joining those organizations in, in, during times of change. So for example, when I went to Cisco, they were experiencing massive growth. They had, when I first started there, they were at, I think it was 30,000 employees. And by the time I left, they were at 75,000. So I joined during this like turmoil of like rapid growth. You know, when I joined, they weren't quite yet that size. But by the time I was there for, you know, 6 months, it now all of a sudden became the most valued company in the world. You know, it was like the Apple of the day. And they had the same— I saw that problem of people should want to work here. People should be begging us for jobs. Then later on, I worked with Google and I got there right at— literally my first day was the day before the IPO. It was cool and trendy, but it wasn't huge, right? And then I stayed there and, you know, long enough to see them grow to several— it was like 3,000 employees or something like that. And now they were really starting to become like, you know, a real company. But still, people should want to work here. They were at the point where they had finished hiring all their friends and now they actually had to recruit people, right?

Right.

Then I went to Microsoft and I left Google to go to Microsoft, which was the opposite. Like Google was recruiting heavily for Microsoft. And so I kind of went upstream, right? Against the current. And I got to Microsoft at a time when they had just learned their lesson that we can't be the company that everybody wants to come work. So it was again another time for turmoil. But at each one of those 3 organizations, I saw this culture of hiring managers almost expecting people to want the job during the interview and not caring as much about what you described. In some places in the organization. But when I interviewed at Microsoft, the reason I'm telling you this story is because it's very relevant to what you just said. They made an offer that was less than what Google was offering at the time. And I was a contractor, so it was either go full-time, you know, convert at Google, or go full-time at Microsoft. The offer at Microsoft wasn't— it was less than what I was making as a contractor. But when I showed up to interview, they picked me up at the airport with a driver, put me up at a decent hotel. My boss's boss and my boss came and visited and took me out for dinner, my wife and I, for dinner. The next day, they sent a real estate agent in a car to help us look around for neighborhoods in the event we might want to relocate because relocation wasn't required. So this was literally a, you know, before your interview, go take a tour of the city with a real estate agent. They do it because they might get the business, you know, but I wasn't going to relocate. So that was nice. Then I had all the interviews prepared. And on the very, very last interview, they had my offer letter ready, like at that last interview. Obviously, they wouldn't have presented the offer if I hadn't passed the interviews. But, you know, and that made all the difference. I spoke with my wife, we went home, we talked about it. And it was like, you know, this is the kind of company I want to work at. And my wife is very pragmatic. So of course she's like, it's not as much money. But then she was also being very pragmatic, said, you're probably going to be happier there.

Yeah.

You didn't know I was going to be happier. She just said, you'll probably be happier. So you're absolutely right. That definitely made the difference between me staying at Google or going to Microsoft.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being proud of the company you work for or being passionate about the company you work for. I think that's what helps me sell, expect especially senior-level, director-level candidates on a, on a, on a smaller organization. But I always caution stakeholders, be careful how much you drink your Kool-Aid, right? Because at the end of the day, that, that pride and passion can cross over into what can be perceived as arrogance.

And we're a great company, but that doesn't mean We're so great that you should be begging for a job. We're not an admissions department, we're a recruiting department.

Exactly, we're not applying to Stanford.

You're not applying to go to school, right? We don't have 300,000 applicants waiting. So that's good. So, so the— you gave me a lot more context than the candidate experience, because I'm sorry if I'm going to make some omelets here, breaking some eggs. You hear a lot about candidate experience, there's a lot of hullabaloo about it, and it can be pretty hyped up. Now I know some of the folks that actually run those programs like Jerry Crispin and Elaine Oehler. And I've, you know, been involved in, in a few things here and there. So I have a little bit of a, of a behind-the-scenes understanding, but also you see a lot of talk about it and then it doesn't really— so you just translated that, I think, for, for, for most people to kind of get the connection between candidate experience and why it's important to recruiting.

It is literally the most talked about topic gets the least amount of attention and action.

Exactly. It's talked about a lot, but most folks think, oh, that's just customer service.

Yeah.

It's not. It's actually a recruiting tool. It's a recruiting tool. You know, yeah, it's about the candidate, but it's about the candidate because it's about us. It's about the candidate because it's about our company. It's not just altruistic. Let's make sure people have a good experience because we want to be good to humans. Yes, that's part of it. But also, it's really important to the company to win over candidates in a very competitive environment, which is right now in the foreseeable future.

People are not going to walk away and say, gee, what a bad experience I typically had with, with Mike, right? They're going to say, wow, that company just doesn't get it. Yeah. Or whatever.

If they don't accept the job, they might think, well, I wish I could work there. And they'll tell other people about it. And somebody asks, hey, you interviewed at this company, what was your experience? And they'll be positive about it.

So bad news travels a lot faster than good news, let me tell you.

That's a pretty, that's a pretty standard trope, right? So when, when you're looking at putting together a recruiting team, I don't know if that's going to be your charter. You haven't started yet, you start on Monday, but I'm assuming part of your job is going to be selecting technology, building a team, etc. What would you say you absolutely must get from sourcing in order to make sourcing worthwhile by either building a sourcing team or, you know, outsourcing it or somehow implementing sourcing in your function? What— let me rephrase. What are the results that you must get from sourcing in order to make sourcing a worthwhile investment in any shape or form?

So as you've said, I really can't speak to my upcoming roles in 2 days, but I can tell you over the last 15 years what I've— how I've evaluated that question in the various environments that I've been in. And really, at the end of the day, I look at sourcing as a partnership, right? I look at it as building a pipeline for immediate needs, right? You know, we've got these recs, these positions that we need to hire over the next 60, 45, whatever your target SLA looks like. But then we also utilize them in a way that builds long-term pipelines, because how many good candidates have we come across in our career where they're like, look, the timing just isn't right. My spouse has a job at the tech company with a ton of equity that we're not going to be ready to move for 2 years, or whatever that reason is. It's typically, I'm not ready to get in process today, but gee, your company sounds really interesting. Would love to stay in touch. So when you look at how you define your sourcing organization, look, I, I've looked at it through both lenses. Do you want someone that has been a really solid recruiter, excellent recruiter, that's now moving into sourcing and is specializing in certain areas? I tend to look at it through the same lens for both. I want my, my sourcers and my recruiters to become verticalized and specialized in their areas. Now I want to cross-train, right? I want people to feel like they've got opportunity to grow their knowledge base and expand within the organization. I don't want them to get pigeonholed just into software engineering or systems engineering or whatever that role looks like.

But at the end of the day, the company's needs are going to change too.

They are, but your people's needs are going to change over time, meaning your team. And you want your team to, to grow and, and feel like they have an opportunity long-term at your organization. Because let's be honest, typically, if you look at an organization, the areas where they sometimes have the highest turnover is in areas like recruiting or things that are considered more transactional than a talent business partner. So when I look at the sourcing and the recruiting teams, I want them to be talent business partners. I want them to be consultants. I want them to become experts. I put them through product training. I want them to understand what it is they're hiring for and how that fits into the bigger picture of the lifecycle of whatever that product is, so that when they engage with these experts out there in the world, they're actually halfway intelligent about what they're speaking to. They're not just asking them questions from a script and then hoping they get the right answers that the hiring managers have given them. So I look at it as both tactical and strategic, right? Because it really, at the end of the day, the pipeline that you're building for today's racks, a percentage of those are going to go into your talent pool that you have to figure out how to stay in contact with over time. So the next time that job—

or you just wasted all that effort, or you just wasted—

you know what, why reinvent invent the wheel every single time you open up a job. That never made sense to me.

Now, it always happens though.

I mean, and it always happens. How do you better let— and that's where you, to your point, technology needs to come into play or strategy. How do you leverage technology to manage your pipeline so that you can stay in, or your talent pool, so you can stay in touch with these people over 6, 12, 18 months, whatever that window looks like. And I, when I look at what's made me successful over time is I've been able to take that concept and distill it down to my individual recruiting desk. Because I always had the magic filing cabinet drawer. This is, you know, now I'm dating myself, right? Early 2000s.

You and I both.

They'd have this really challenging role that they thought would take half a year to fill, and I just happen to have two people here I stayed in touch with because they weren't the right fit for what I was hiring, but I knew they'd be a fit someday for something, right?

Yep.

You pull them out, you get them into process, and you typically get one or both hired. So, um, how do you leverage your sourcing team to do that? It requires you know, a lot of guidance. I think where a lot of organizations fail is they can't put their sourcing teams on autopilot, or they treat them like vending machines, or they treat them like a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Exactly right.

Where you have to take a holistic approach. Yeah, I have needs I need to take care of today, but I want you to be strategic. I don't want you to throw away 75% of these people you reached out to simply because today's job is not right for them, or because they said, no, I'm not ready to move today. Because as you know, sales is a little bit of a recruiting process, right? And how quickly and easily you take no for an answer will determine how healthy your talent pool is going to be long term.

Yeah, that's a good point. So pipe, what they call a pipeline in sales, is exactly that. It's, it's the people you've been talking to who weren't ready to buy that may be ready to buy at some point in the future. Haven't they outright said no, not interested, not a fit, not for me? That they also haven't said yes. It's the same thing with, with talent, and recruiting treats that quote-unquote pipeline as a list. They applied today, they didn't get in, so we're gonna zip it up, close it, put it in the database, and then open the job up again 6 months later and new people apply, completely forgetting about the old ones.

And never go back to your database. Yeah, that is the biggest waste of resources, right?

I have a database. Yeah. Exactly. So how do you respond to the comments that people very often make about measuring the results of sourcing and recruiting? Even here in the Facebook group, there's one by Rob McIntosh who posted that the best metric for measuring the quality of sourcing is the one metric from his blog post, the one metric to rule them all, which is submittals to business accepts. So that's a very good metric to use. I think there's, there's 3 or 4, maybe 5 very strong metrics. And the percentage of submittals that anyone, recruiter or sourcer, makes to a hiring manager that is accepted definitely looks at quality, right? Because if you're sourcing the right people, the hiring manager is accepting them. However, how do we then separate the results from sourcing from those of recruiting because of what you just said. That metric fails in that environment. The submitted to business accept doesn't measure maintaining the pipeline. It doesn't even look at all the work and effort that's put into a candidate that wasn't hired today. And I'll give you a really good example. My recent position at Fiserv, I was there for 5 years. There was a year where my individual metrics— I carried some recs as well as there were, you know, lots of different strategic programs and everything, but I had some recs. My recent numbers, when my boss's boss was doing annual review and said, how many hires did you make this year? I went in and I looked into the system and I saw it was like 12 hires. Pathetic for somebody at the level that I was operating in, considering the average recruiter there was making $70,000 and the top ones were making $120,000 to $130,000, Now I'm a sourcer, not a recruiter. I'm a sourcing lead. So, you know, all that taken into consideration, but still part of my measurement, my value to the company was how many hires did you make? Well, I looked at the data and I saw 12. And I thought to myself, I can't go back to my boss and tell her that I only made 12 hires this year. That's not right. I know that's not right. I know I made more hires than that, first of all. Secondly, that's— if I was her, I would fire me for only making, you know, even though I'm doing lots of other things, it's still just not enough. So I went back and I did some forensics. And what I ended up finding, which was also applicable to the rest of the members of my team, was that I had more like 35 hires. But the reason is many of the people that I had submitted didn't get that job. They got the next one or the one after that. So I brought them in, I found them, I brought them in, I connected them to the recruiter. Other members of my sourcing team did the same thing. Then they were runner-ups, silver medalists, whatever you want to call it. Maybe didn't even make it past the first interview, but they applied for another job unbeknownst to me, unbeknownst to the other recruiter, and they got that job. So Mike, you're the recruiter, I'm the sourcer. I send you Sam, your hiring manager doesn't hire Sam, but you give good feedback. Yeah, Sam's okay, just, you know, we had a better candidate. No problem. And then 6 months later, some other recruiter gets Sam as an applicant and they hire her for a position. I don't get that. That submittal to accept, that submittal to hiring manager accept quality rate measures the quality of my submittals, but it doesn't measure the quality of me as a sourcer.

Right.

Because that person still got hired. I still found a good candidate for the company. And I brought someone in that was never considering us as an employer. The only reason they applied for that other job is because now they're interested in us because I did a good job, as you said, with the candidate experience. Yeah. They liked it. So they came back and they wanted to work here. So they applied for another or another, sometimes 3 or 4 jobs. So how do you account for that? What do you say to people that say hires is all that matters or submittal to accept is all that matters.

I would say if you're going to try to whittle it down to a silver bullet, you would have probably made a billion dollars by now and written a book. So we know that it's—

I did write a book, but it doesn't sell well.

It doesn't sell well, right? No. Look, at the end of the day, it is like rocket fuel. It takes a lot of different mixture of different elements and different percentages to get that rocket off the launch pad, right? So when I look at the scenario that you just gave me, number one, there's a couple gaps I think that is called out here. When this person applies, your ATS should flag that they're already in the system, right? Then, and then the recruiter should do a little due diligence and figure out, okay, if this person is already in the system, why do we not hire them before? So are you putting good notes in the system? Oh, I can see that. Yeah. So there you go. So you got some breakdowns and processes there, right? And the only way that you can get to a point where you can say, I feel comfortable with X, Y, and Z as a metric is to ensure all your other things are in place that will allow those metrics to be accurate. Because what's the very first thing people do when they find a mistake in data? They never trust the data going forward again, or it takes you a long time to overcome that, right?

Or they try to clean it, which is a nightmare.

Exactly. So what we have to do is make sure that the sourcers and the recruiters are working together as a team or in a pod so that when this scenario happens, that recruiter does the extra due diligence to make sure they understand why are they in the system, why did they not get hired for the last role, read the notes, reach out to the recruiter, you or the sourcer, and figure out, you know, what transpired here. What was our impression of this individual? What was the feedback from the hiring manager? Okay, great. Well, we're going to go ahead and put this forward because you did find a good person for this company. They just were hired 2 or 3 cycles later and you should get credit for that job because it's your engagement that got them excited about the company to get them to apply again. So you got to root cause it all the way back to the very beginning. Now, you can't do that if you're in a high-volume environment where you're hiring, you know, 500 to 1,200 people a year. Being able to root cause that becomes a little bit of an issue if your people aren't using the tools as they were designed and implemented. If your teams, your recruiting and sourcing teams, aren't working together as close-knit individuals, as groups, making sure that the communication is flowing and they're doing their root cause analysis. And the second thing is, why didn't the recruiter look in the database right away to see who, who we've interviewed that has these skill sets that might be a potential fit? Why did it have to come in through an application? So again, it's easy to sit here and quarterback this scenario when we are in the thick of it, you know, trying to hire, you know, 50 people a month and you're all over the place. But if you put that foundation in where you lay out the design of the tools, why the design is there, how you're supposed to effectively utilize it, and then ultimately get to your data output and analyze. Like for example, we did this at my last company, ZT Systems. I could tell you exactly how many candidates were hired from my sourcing team. Whether it was hired for the initial submittal or the job that was 3 cycles down the road, because that person's name always stayed attached to that candidate regardless of how they came into the system.

With data.

With data.

So what I'm hearing you say, I'm going to recap a little bit here. What I'm hearing you say is a metric like submittals to business accept or submittals to hiring manager accept is a— that's a very good measure of quality and that works to measure quality. but only if the other things are in place. So you have to have quality data, the systems need to be used. So that metric is a good metric, but it doesn't work if you have bad data. So for example, this is the argument that I made at Fiserv with, with, with my leadership team. I went back and I said, look, I only have 12 hires in the system, but really I think there are 35 candidates in the ATS that have my name attached. Because that was tracked. So, you know, they were, but I also told my leader, I said, I don't want to take credit for that because I don't want the recruiters who made those hires to have to share credit because that's not why I'm here. However, I wasn't, you know, my job wasn't to get hires. I wasn't a recruiter. I was strategic sourcing team leader, not a recruiter. In other words, if a recruiter is getting credit for that hire, and I get credit for the hire, two people can't get credit for the same thing. See what I mean? Yeah. So I said, let's implement something that looks at the influence, right? Like influencing a hire.

Like a weight factor.

Exactly. That was one part of it. And then the other part of it was, how are we measuring that other piece, the pipeline? So because my argument against this single metric is this, If, if I know that I'm being measured only by submit to business accept, that's all I'm going to do.

Yep.

I'm going to only submit candidates that I know are going to get accepted, and I will do nothing else. I won't share candidates, I won't provide candidate experience, I won't contribute to the team, I won't attend meetings. All I will do is submit and accept because that means that I'm going to have the best score.

Now, obviously, that's extreme, but yeah, but your metrics drive the behavior and exactly don't drive the desired behavior. Then you shouldn't be surprised with the outcome.

And I think that's a great number.

But, but look, look how many bodies you left alongside the road.

Yeah, I didn't do that, by the way. But that's my, you know, that's my devil's advocate.

But I think that's where organizations don't implement sourcing and recruiting effectively when they don't look at what is the dynamic you want to exist between these two teams and how are these two teams driving towards that singular goal getting the right hire, as they say, butts in seats. Well, if you're going to put metrics in place that, that drive that collaboration, that drive that partnership, if you're going to be an example of that as a leader, then I think you're going to get a very different outcome than if you turn it into a transactional evaluation of give me your numbers, give me your numbers, give me numbers. Well, then that number element you may think is driving the right outcome, but you may only be getting 50% of your capacity out of that.

Because it's all focused on that one transaction.

And the reason why they measure that, because it's too hard to measure all the other stuff we talked about.

Pipeline is hard to measure. That's right. That's why I asked the question in the group, how do you measure quality and sourcing? Because, you know, I wish it was one answer, but, you know, like you said before, it isn't. Um, I know we're probably a little bit over time, but I did have one burning question that I wanted to ask. You've implemented 3 very, very large and very different ATS systems. You've implemented Jobvite, iCIMS, and Workday. All three of those, um, were hot items at the time, right? Workday is, is maybe the hot one now. Um, Jobvite, you know, maybe the previous one, and iCIMS, you know, before that. So all three of these, and they're very different systems. What advice do you have for someone looking at implementing any of those three Sure. From the point of view of what are the common pitfalls across all three? What did you run into that didn't matter which ATS you bought, you would have had to run into?

Yeah. So that's a great question. And I will tell you the very first place you should start is understanding what is the data that your stakeholders want to come out of that system, right? So whether that's state hiring manager data, whether that's executive level data, whether that's the data you need to use as a manager, just manage the day-to-day operations of your team, you have to design the system to be able to deliver that information to you. The second thing is understand from your stakeholders, what is it they want to get out of that system from a daily use perspective, and then your recruiting team. So if you fail to bring the people around the table and maybe your system has to feed into payroll and maybe it has to feed into benefits or whatever automations that you put in place, bring everybody around the table and give them a voice. Now that doesn't mean they're going to get everything that they want, But understand from the top down, what do all these outputs— you start with the outputs and then you work back to the design and figure out what they want.

Okay, so I'm hearing the analysis part of— in other words, the analytics that are produced by the system or can be produced by the system are, no matter which system, right, are an issue. So you have to address it. Okay.

Yeah, because let's be honest, how many ATSs out there have great reporting functions?

None of them do, but everyone, you know, people find ways around it.

Has their strengths, everyone has their weaknesses, you know, whether it's reporting or whether it's the workflows that you need to design or the customizations you need to put in place. I will tell you, iSIMS, the one that I would find I would always probably start with is just in the discovery process is because it's so customizable. I can customize that tool to almost any workflow that I need, any outputs that I need to share across my organization. And for the most part, any data I need to get out from an analytics perspective. Workday, when it first came out, Workday Recruit first came out, I think they tried to redefine what an ATS is, and that didn't go over so well. And over time, they've kind of rethought that approach. And now, from what I understand, I haven't used it in a couple years, but from what I understand, it is, it is a more robust tool than it was, I think, during Workday 22 when it first came out, if I'm not mistaken.

Well, in a lot of ways, yes, but it's also because they implemented a query structure, query system, um, so that it, it makes it possible to extract the data. Because with Workday, they didn't really build it, um, with a, with a report capability. It was built with views.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like you have to construct every view from scratch. But they did, um, produce now— so now there's a way to query the system with a command level, you know, so you need an analyst that can program that, right? There is a way to do it, fortunately. That was a big gap.

But you start with the end in mind, right?

Yeah, start with the end in mind. Okay, so they all three have a gap in, in analytics from the point of view of you have to define what you want it to produce before you implement it. Otherwise you might end up implementing something that can't produce what your leaders want. Exactly.

And then the workflows, this is the The, the candidate experience, the hiring manager experience, and the recruiter experience. Make sure you engage all three of those groups to understand how you need to build out those workflows. What information needs to flow where? What are the security levels? What do you want people to have access to? What do they not need to have access to? If you take less than 4 to 6 months to go through a discovery and a mock, like a sandbox development, you're rushing too fast. Unless you feel like the system you have today actually has everything exactly that you need, you just need to move into it. A more robust, capable system, you still have a degree of discovery you need to do to understand what does that endpoint look like. But I think where a lot of organizations fail is they tend to do it in isolation in there within their own recruiting organization. Sometimes they don't even engage the rest of the HR team.

Yeah, that happens a lot. This tool they think is ideal, and it is probably ideal, and they want to just open the box and have it work, which it can as an isolated standalone system, right? But the moment you try to connect anything to it, now all of a sudden you have all these Or the HR business partner says, oh, well, we need to be able to do this, this, and this. Oh, I didn't think of that.

We didn't think of that. Or payroll's like, well, we need to know this, this, and this before the start date. So again, start with the end in mind, but get your stakeholders around the table, your partners, and understand all of their needs, because it's not just you and your team. It's everyone that you touch in the organization that needs to be able to have input into that. And then kind of put together the best possible— and understand your first go at this is not going to be your final version. You're going to upgrade and update that over time as you discover new needs or as, as needs change, and you got to be okay with that.

So looking at the system from the point of view of like, how easy is it going to be to do that, to update it, to reconfigure it?

And that's part— that's again starting with the end in mind. If I know I'm going to have to modify this system over time, is— does the system lend itself to that, or is it basically, here's the box I have to live within And is that scalable over the next 5 years? Because if you, if you put a system in place that has a life cycle less than 5 years, you're probably wasting your time.

Meaning it needs to last at least 5 years?

It needs to last. It needs to grow with your organization. It needs to scale for your needs, and it also needs to be able to continue to evolve as your business evolves. Because how many new product lines will you be adding? How many new parts, new companies will you be acquiring? All these things need to kind of be taken into account when you're deciding how— what's the best path forward and what tool should we really be settling with.

So the end in mind, backwards from the end in mind, isn't just the analytics. It's also can it grow? Can it scale with you? Can it plug into the things that you don't know you're going to buy yet? Okay. Totally unfair question. And which of the three, Jobvite, iCIMS, or Workday, was easier to implement? Just, just to implement?

I will say Jobvite was probably the easiest to implement, um, because I was able to do all the configuration myself.

Oh, okay.

However, I would say iSIMS was probably the better— the best use of my time because it was more scalable over time. Now again, this was probably 4 years ago, so I, I don't— I don't want to speak to their, their capabilities today. So ease of implementation was Jobvite. Best use of time for longevity was probably iSims. Workday, it doesn't really make— you don't really have Workday unless you've got Workday HRIS generally. So unless your company's on that tool, but even then, I'm not sure I'm completely sold that Workday Recruit is the path to go just because it's integrated. Automatic integration or component integration doesn't guarantee success.

It doesn't predicate that it's going to work. Yeah. And we found that out as well. You know, we found out that was the case at Fiserv, and then we had to make it work. Yeah, my last boss when I was there, the boss that was the boss that was my boss before I left, the Workday was her baby, and that was— she was like the grand poobah of all things Workday. And so I lived shoulder to shoulder with her in a lot of ways, helping figure out some of the things that needed to get done in order to make the recruit module do the things that recruiters needed to do. And it, you know, we got it to work. It worked, right? So I'm not saying it didn't work or— but, you know, so I guess the follow-up question to that, which one of those was easiest to implement, would be which one of those is easiest to maintain and run, like operate? Yeah.

So I'd say Jobvite, right? Because again, I can do everything myself in a sandbox environment. I could test it and then I could push it live into the environment. And they didn't require a lot of what I call engineering support at the back end on their side. They gave you a lot of control over the various workflows, the various templates, the various tools. So from that perspective, I'd say, you know, if you're a mid-market, small to mid-market company that you don't want to have to depend on the vendor to provide a lot of configuration support, you know, Jobvite. There's another tool I just use at Z2 Systems called ClearCompany, very similar, very similar abilities, very similar configuration capabilities. You know, iSIMS was There was a lot I could do locally on iSIMS, but it did require significantly more engineering support during the initial rollout and then with the upgrades. But it was very useful. I mean, that was a tool that you could have in a large enterprise environment very easily. You could start with 1,000 people and know that that could grow with you to 50,000 and still be able to serve your needs, right? So again, to answer your question, easiest individual implementation was Jobvite. But I think again If I knew my company was on a trajectory over the next 5 years, I might spend the time to sit down and implement ISIMMS just so I'm not—

because of long-term longevity, capability to customize it overall.

It takes a lot of cycles to implement a tool, to go through the discovery process and implement that. Do you really want to do that every 5 years?

I wish I had time for one more question, but we're running out. I told you I was only going to keep you for half hour, and I'm sure you want to go on your vacation. Um, so maybe we'll, we'll have you on another show, or, or if you have a quick quip for us. The one thing that I would say is, what's in the horizon that you think is a technology that's going to disrupt everything that we don't know about?

You know, neural networks or machine learning. Um, okay, I, I— look, those are— that's what Jim said.

Exactly. Were you listening to that show?

No, actually, I don't. I apologize. I didn't get it.

That's exactly what he said.

These terms are thrown around a lot. I still don't think we really know what it means just yet. I think we're in the discovery process of how that applies not just to the real world, but to recruiting in general. So I'm always a little cautious when I see these buzzwords and product promotions from the various—

like AI, that irritates me to no end. It's not AI, come on, call it machine learning, but don't call it AI.

But what does that really mean? How do you apply that in our world? Right. But I think because it has so much promise and it has produced so much in other areas of our lives, I think there's a lot of potential. I just don't think we know what it is yet.

What it is?

Yeah.

Good. Well, hey, you know what? If fools seldom differ, right? If 3 people are right and have the same opinion, there must be some truth to that, you know?

Yeah, that was all really good friends.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, hey, thanks so much for having, you know, for coming on the show here and—

My pleasure.

—answering these questions. I hope we can have you back at another time and good luck with your new job. I appreciate it.

Have a great weekend.

You too. Take care. Bye-bye.